Almost one out of every two people over the age of 50 now has a social network account. That’s up from 22% just one year ago, according to the latest study from the Pew Internet research group. 61% of those between the age of 30 and 49 now have a social network account, and a blistering 86% of 18- to 29-year-olds are connected to Facebook or Twitter, or some other social network site – they do exist.

Paul Smith is a British blogger, writer and former radio executive. An advocate of social media, Smith coined the phrase “twitchhiking” when he travelled around the world using the social media network Twitter.

Maryland will become one of the first states in the nation next month to regulate how candidates identify themselves on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

If you’ve got a large album or a lot of friends in a single photo, this process is inefficient and tedious. To solve this problem, Facebook has implemented face detection technology that will automatically find faces in photos and select them, eliminating one of the most tedious steps in tagging Facebook friends in photos. Your friends are already selected by the software — all you have to do is answer the Facebook prompt, “Whose face is this?”

I typically maintain this site from work in my spare time and access to Twitter was just cut off. The IT personnel had thus far not noticed it or added it to the black list but the day of reckoning has arrived. Facebook and other social sites, along with all streaming video has been blocked for quite some time, hence the lack of embedded video over the last several months….

Loveable Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called his first few thousand users “dumb f*cks” for trusting him with their data, published IM transcripts show. Facebook hasn’t disputed the authenticity of the transcript. ** Includes graph depicting current privacy trends on Facebook **

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Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

Sharing your information, private or otherwise, with other companies is big business. Not only can your friends find you in the field, companies can connect with you too through the rapidly expanding geographic capabilities of positioning utilities. The basic privacy and protection that you once had within your home sitting alongside your Dell Dimension desktop is now compromised significantly by the new geo-tagging utilities building the out-of-home market.

There will be lots of news leaking about Facebook’s product announcements at their upcoming F8 Developer Conference in April. That’s because they’re already starting to test out a lot of the new stuff with third party developers, and once two people know a secret, it isn’t really a secret any more. One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site.